Smitty

Walter Berndt's *Smitty* follows a mischievous boy through urban adventures, told across four panels with crisp linework and dynamic action. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comic conventions: recurring child protagonist, visual gags dependent on physical comedy, and speech balloons anchoring each scene. Published in the dailies and Sunday pages of the 1920s, *Smitty* helped establish the visual vocabulary that would become standard in comic art—distinct panel borders, expressive faces, and sequential narration moving left to right. Like contemporaries such as *Skippy* and *The Katzenjammer Kids*, the strip carried the aesthetic lessons of animation and vaudeville into print, shaping how comics would tell stories for decades to come.